Some products have not only become defined by their name but have been so successful they end up defining all products of the same type like “Kleenex” and “Band-Aid” .  Others have found out that their product name can end up portraying the wrong image like Chevrolet’s Nova car – “No va” meaning “it doesn’t go” in Spanish! The French company Bull Computers also had a hard time with its “Bull” named products in North America.  However, Bull also launched a clever marketing campaign around the ambiguity of its name entitled “Know Bull” which did get some attention.

At this year’s Sapphire, Sir Richard Branson told this great story of how when he went to register the name “Virgin” for his company in the UK, the company registration official turned it down because they deemed the name as rude. So Branson returned the next day with a dictionary showing the definition of “virgin” as being pure and they accepted it.

So I have been somewhat intrigued about recent forum discussions surrounding SAP’s decision to rename Xcelsius – their amazing and very popular dashboard product.

Xcelsius already had some name recognition when Business Objects acquired Infommersion (the original developers) in November 2005 but then proceeded to rename it Crystal Xcelsius. This resulted in a lot of confusion as people started to relate the product to Crystal Reports and thought it was an add-on to this report writer product.  So when the next major release was developed, the decision was made to drop the Crystal name and so Xcelsius 2008 came to market.

For the last two years Xcelsius has become one of the most popular and prolifically used BI dashboard products in the marketplace and its name has become synonymous with data visualization and dynamic dashboards. 

So why would you take this very well known product with such a cool and catchy name as Xcelsius and rename it SAP Crystal Dashboard Design or SAP Enterprise Dashboard Design?

Well apparently this is because SAP uses a “master brand strategy” where SAP is the master brand and the product brand name takes a back seat. 

So why not SAP Xcelsius?

Well this is because SAP also uses “descriptive naming” for all its products so in the case of Xcelsius, the back seat has been completely removed!

Since “SAP Crystal Dashboard Design” is so long, it is bound to become abbreviated. However, I doubt this will be shortened to “SCDD” since a Google search points you to the “California State Council on Development Disabilities” .  It is more likely to become “Dashboard Design” since that is the new descriptive product name.  A Google search on “Dashboard Design” comes up with about 2.5 million results starting off with Qlikview, followed by Tableau Software then Corda and SAP Crystal Dashboard Design comes in at about number 14.  Interestingly, there is little ambiguity when you search on “Xcelsius”.

Translating Dashboard Design into other languages may also prove interesting.  Xcelsius will always translate into Xcelsius in all languages and I have a feeling the name will persist. At the end of the day, it is not just the name that counts, it’s the product itself. Xcelsius is as unique as a product as it is as a name. I will never forget that day in 2005 when I first saw it and was totally blown away. Infommersion created something truly amazing and ahead of its time. It remains top of its class and, for me, Xcelsius will always be Xcelsius.

IBIS 2010 Beach view

This year’s InfoSol Business Intelligence Seminar (IBIS) was just packed with high quality and in-depth boot camps and seminars covering Xcelsius, Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Data Services, BO XI 3.1 Administration and lots more. It was also located at the beautiful Ritz Carlton, Dana Point on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean which was the perfect remedy after a day of absorbing tons of knowledge.

The Welcome reception on Sunday night, entitled “Seeing Beyond Business Intelligence” was set in the Solutions Showcase area where sponsors demonstrated and discussed some of their latest business intelligence solutions.  I delivered the keynote the following morning on the same “Seeing Beyond” theme and highlighted some interesting business intelligence customer case studies.  The keynote on the Tuesday from Santiago Becerra, CEO of Mellmo, was quite fascinating as he took the audience through “the Evolution of Think” and cleverly demonstrated how putting fun into regular tasks can change people’s habits as well as their adoption of solutions. Showing Roambi, the latest business intelligence solution for the iPad, really brought the point home well.

The 2010 Best Xcelsius Awards demonstrated how far many companies have come in applying Xcelsius in very complex and powerful applications and inspired many others to go even further so I would watch out for next year’s awards.

I had the opportunity to meet with many people during the event and dive into some great discussions on both existing challenges in various BI implementations as well as future directions. In general, it appeared that most companies lag about 3 to 5 years behind the latest releases of SAP BusinessObjects and other BI solutions. Occasionally there is some critical new functionality that will compel a company to adopt a new release sooner but that tends to be the exception to the rule.  Many customers expressed that having reliability, stability and consistent performance are more important than most new functionality. Some of the newer solutions like Xcelsius dashboards and Roambi mobile business intelligence appear to circumnavigate this pattern since they can often be deployed and highly effective outside of the main business intelligence and production applications. A further big factor here is cost as many companies are more hesitant, due in part to the recent global recession, to spend large amounts of time and money on new software until they have conclusively proven a solid return on investment. For this reason incremental software purchases and pilot projects have become very popular in the BI space.

This was evident at IBIS as customers expressed a lot of interest in Xcelsius, XDM, Roambi, XWIS, GMaps, 360View, Version Manager and SAP BO EDGE solutions for very specific business issues and needs.

All in all, IBIS 2010 was a great BI gathering and information exchange and continues to grow in popularity. A couple of lucky attendees won iPads and a couple of not-so-lucky attendees dropped their phones in the ocean, but judging by the feedback everyone can’t wait to do it again.

Here are a few of the comments received back on IBIS 2010 :

“The IBIS conference was terrific this year.  I can’t wait to incorporate write-backs into our dashboards, and InfoBurst 2009 with dashboard bursting opens new doors for delivering customer information.  I also really enjoyed Aluchemie’s customer demo with all of their challenges they had to overcome!”

Kim Marshall, Waldinger Corporation

“I wanted to commend you and your team on the wonderful seminar.  My colleagues are very enthusiastic about their boot camp and the knowledgeable instructors they have met. You and your team have been wonderful throughout the past few days and everyone’s terrific attitudes have made the seminar a great success”

Melinda Dennis, Aluchemie

When asked, “What was the best part of the seminar for you?”, here are some of the responses :

“User Panel – excellent recognition of organizations with creative solutions”

“The class time. The first time I have ever been to a seminar where I was asked right from the beginning to reverse engineer an example”

“ The chance to talk and network with pros, find out what SAP doesn’t tell you about the product and get the best practices from people who have been in the trenches”

“…invaluable talking with other companies and knowledge sharing”

“… the workshops were excellent and very exercise intense so there was no boredom factor”

“Meeting with other users of the tools – It is a great way to get new ideas”

“The tips on real life best practices were extremely valuable – something that you cannot always get from other conferences”

“Size of the event led to good instruction and interaction”

“The training far surpasses any other training in the BI field. InfoSol has created a habitat for intensive training efforts at an economical price”

“The fact that I am learning things that are actually going to help me solve current problems – which also helps me sleep better at night”

The incredible number of sessions , demos , exhibits and collaboration meetings means you can only participate in a fraction of what is available and you need to be quite discriminating – it’s a bit like going to Disneyworld and, in fact, I think by the second day a lot of people did wander off there!

The keynotes on the first day were impressive starting with an interview style session with Sir Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Empire. He provided some excellent insights into the success of Virgin explaining how employees who are proud of the company they work for will more likely be passionate about their jobs.  Branson also stressed the importance of reducing carbon emissions and talked about the new “carbon currency” and how they were working on new “clean” fuels projects producing fuels that will not harm the environment.

This aptly led into the second keynote from Al Gore who talked eloquently and intelligently about the importance of the sustainability initiative that is becoming an integral component of companies and institutions around the world.  Gore emphasized the need to build consensus and the brand enhancement that many companies are gaining by going green and implementing sustainability initiatives.  SAP has made a commitment to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% over the coming years while still substantially growing the company.

SAP had set up a whole segment in the exhibit area dedicated to its Sustainability offerings. I sat in on one of the presentations and was impressed at how comprehensive and integrated it appeared to be. 

Paul Grill, Giant iPad and Santiago Becerra

With so much to see in the Exhibit area, I tended to gravitate at first to the booths that had the most traffic. Since everyone appeared to be raffling off an iPad (no shortage here!), there had to be something more appealing to draw people in. That was certainly the case at the Mellmo booth with their giant-sized iPhone and iPad displaying its Roambi solution with some amazingly visual Business Intelligence analytics. Since SAP has identified one of its three major initiatives for this year as being mobile integration and delivery, this was a hot topic at Sapphire and RoamBi was white hot.

The best presentations I attended were the customer case studies and there was a great one in the Small and Medium Enterprise track where 3 customers were interviewed about the business benefits realized after implementing SAP Business Intelligence solutions.  One of the customers was an on-line supermarket chain and he explained how implementing BusinessObjects with a Data Mart allowed them to see that they were receiving a large number of complaints about their egg deliveries – mainly that some of the eggs were cracked or damaged. Their BusinessObjects solution allowed them to drill down on this data on a daily basis and analyze further what might be the potential causes. They subsequently discovered that there were a much larger number of complaints with eggs delivered in cardboard cartons compared to plastic cartons so they switched to plastic cartons only. In addition they implemented a simple new procedure for the packer to quickly visually check the eggs in the carton prior to packaging. The result of these two actions was a 75% reduction in complaints of egg deliveries.

I love these type of stories because it so clearly shows that Business Intelligence is a combination of analyzing data and human interpretation and action on the results.

All in all, it was a “cracking” first day at Sapphire!

The actors used real swords and weapons as they would have done in Shakespeare’s day and the guide explained that back in those days, people expected the actors to be good swordsmen and everything had to be authentic to be entertaining.  He went on to tell us that going to see a play in the time of Shakespeare was equivalent to going to see a soccer game today. The crowd would be a little rowdy, drinking beer and wanting to be entertained. A good fight scene, compelling drama, bawdy jokes, witty dialogue and a good story were all essential ingredients to a successful play. Shakespeare was a master at this, and not only did he write his plays for the actors on stage, but he wrote them in a way to educate, involve and engage this audience of “soccer fans.”  Famous scenes like Marc Anthony’s speech after the death of Caesar “Friends, Roman’s Countrymen lend me your ears……” is a good example.

In fact, the audience participated so much in one play that they actually caused the first Globe Theater to burn down after some soldiers in the audience fired-off a real cannon in the middle of a battle scene! Yes, “soccer hooligans” date way back in British history!

The education part was important too because most people in those days were illiterate and never attended schools. The plays were a great way to teach history, tell stories, inspire passions and provide life lessons.

The InfoSol Business Intelligence Seminar (IBIS) has incorporated some of the same concepts as Shakespeare did in his plays. IBIS is all about engaging and involving the attendees in Business Intelligence in meaningful and practical ways. That is why most of the tracks are hands-on, so you are participating actively. The boot camps and workshops are based on real world usage of the solutions, so they will be compelling and tell a good (and true) story of how they are applied.

The instructors and consultants are like professional Shakespearian actors in that they are skilled, not just in explaining their topic, but also in its practical usage. They know how to wield those Business Intelligence tools like those actors wield their weapons! They are also passionate about Business Intelligence and inspire their audience to go forth and do great things with their newly acquired skills.

IBIS is also all about education; making it interesting and entertaining to gain more knowledge. Outside of the main tracks, there are plenty of opportunities to interact with your peers over a drink or meal and exchange ideas and war stories just like the original Globe Theater audiences did before the play and between the Acts.  In addition, plenty of Business Intelligence experts and developers are on hand to both demonstrate the newest solutions and field your toughest questions.

While at IBIS (June 6 to June 9, 2010 at the Ritz Carlton, Laguna Nigel – view map), I only ask that you try your best not to get too carried away during the event and to definitely leave the cannons back at the office!

I checked in at the Kong Arthur Hotel (Kong being King in Danish) and made it to my room where this huge modern painting hung above my bed. I have included a picture since it will have different interpretations to each viewer.  At that time it was saying to me “No matter how tied up in knots you are, come to bed”. In the morning, I noticed there was both the outline of a man and a woman in the picture and I had a totally different interpretation.

Although I did not see a lot of Denmark in one day, I did get to meet quite a few Danish people in my meetings and learned that Denmark is the home of Lego, Lager beer, ham and Vikings. I also noticed that the average Dane is significantly taller than the average European – must be that special beer and ham! 

I was visiting one of the largest companies in Denmark where a couple of the divisions use BusinessObjects for their Business Intelligence. They were interested in finding a better way to schedule, publish and distribute their reports so I showed them a demonstration of the new InfoBurst 2009 along with presenting a few customer case studies. They were particularly excited about the ability of InfoBurst to apply Excel macro post processing. It seems they, like many other companies, have large numbers of Excel users that want all their Business Intelligence reports delivered in Excel format but publishing reports directly from BusinessObjects to Excel does not provide all the features in the Excel output that they want delivered to the user. For example, one customer wanted to make use of data grouping and outlining within Excel for one-click collapse and expansion of individual data groupings in the report. In addition, they wanted each and every data group and outline to be automatically collapsed in the initial delivery of the report – keeping the report compact and easier to view. This simply cannot be done publishing from BusinessObjects to Excel but with InfoBurst 2009, you can execute a VBA macro following report production and produce a revised version of the report for publishing.

This caused great excitement amongst my Danish audience and there were smiles and vigorous hand shaking at the end of the meeting.  I think they really appreciated the logical building block of adding the Excel post-processing – just like Lego!

This leads to some interesting situations as I discovered when meeting with perspective partners there. The first partner was primarily based in the French region and most of their clients were also based in the French region whereas the second partner was from the German region as were most of their clients. Even more fascinating was that the French Swiss prefer not to speak German to the German Swiss and vice versa even though they learned the respective languages growing up. Ironically they often end up speaking to each other in English which is not a native language to either of them!

When I enquired about the Italian region of Switzerland, I was referred to another partner that is Swiss Italian based!

In the world of Business Intelligence, we find a similar situation with the different vendors’ product suites. BusinessObjects, Cognos, Oracle and Microsoft BI all have their native tools that communicate very differently and there is no easy way to dialog between them.

In many customer situations that is changing as the demand and desire to use multiple vendor tools has become a necessity for many businesses.  The common dialog in this case is the portal or the main application where the user first logs in.  The most common portals I encounter are either the homegrown kind or Microsoft’s SharePoint. Through this portal, it is possible to seamlessly connect with different applications and different vendors Business Intelligence tools. Reports, dashboards and ad-hoc queries can all be accessed and viewed as if they were coming from the same application. Utilizing single sign-on also makes it possible to transparently pass authentication credentials to the various applications and tools without the user having to tediously log on to multiple systems and applications.

I end up discussing with my perspective Swiss partners how many corporations in North America are using mixed Business Intelligence tools through portals like SharePoint and how key solutions like Web Intelligence, Xcelsius and InfoBurst integrate easily.

As I head to Geneva airport, I spot a chocolate store and have to go in to browse and inhale the smell of heaven (I have a weak spot for chocolate). As I float through the store in my element, I cannot help wondering that while the Swiss may speak different languages, they have their chocolate as their portal to universal communication!

After spending 20 minutes putting on all the protective equipment and some bright purple pants that my son insisted were an essential part of any serious snowboarder’s attire, we headed for the slopes where he showed me how to strap my boots to the snowboard.  The next part was significantly more challenging, namely how to stand up when attached to your board. After scores of failed attempts that amused the groups of youngsters watching to no end, my son finally showed me that if I rolled on my belly and then pushed myself up while facing up the mountain, I could actually stand up without immediately falling over again! Of course, this made me look like a beached whale, but it did work!

My first run down the slope was not very graceful and ended with a spectacular head first crash into the snow.  On my second run I collided with my son who bravely tried to slow me down and paid the price as I simultaneously wiped us both out.

The third and forth runs were not actually bad as I completed a couple of 50 yard runs at some speed. Amazingly, I survived my first ever 90 minutes of snowboarding with no broken bones or serious bruises but I was so exhausted from all the falls and attempts to stand up, that I could barely move a muscle.

As we sat and ate lunch, my son explained that I did better on a snowboard than I did on skis because my feet were locked in a position on the board and I could not move them like I can with skis.

Sometimes when there are less options or steps involved, we tend to master them quicker.  The same is true in Business Intelligence. If you give a user a Universe or View with access to hundreds of objects in different databases and a tool like Web Intelligence for self-service query and analysis, they will usually struggle to create any type of useful report, get themselves tied up in knots and become frustrated to the point of blaming the tool and not wanting to use it again.

If, on the other hand, you create a small specialized universe or view for a user with just a few relevant objects and a pre-made report that with which they can start, they have less options and directions to choose and they can master the tool a lot easier. They can still add, delete, modify, sort, filter and save in different formats but they are working from an already created report and do not have an overwhelming number of choices to select.

While many Business Intelligence tools have become more powerful, feature-rich and versatile, most users just want information delivered in a simple, easy-to-understand way and do not want to spend time learning products and becoming experts in tools that they may not use that often.

InfoSol has developed many self-service business intelligence solutions using Web Intelligence, Xcelsius Dashboards and InfoBurst and applying best practices to allow users to get immediate benefit from them without weeks of training and usage.

Now, not everyone wants to be a casual user and those individuals should take more advanced training.  But, for the novice snowboarders like me, just standing, staying up and gliding for 50 yards is great!

He has to work on the Saturday so he sets me up in an Italian restaurant /pub with WiFi so I can catch up on a week of being out of the office. So for four hours, I diligently work away as various interesting characters come in and out – mainly to use the bathroom but sometimes for food or a drink.

At about 6 pm, I hear a lot of noise outside in the street; a combination of shouting and honking car horns.  Then suddenly, this man with his pants around his ankles and wearing a thong and a tiger mask bursts into the restaurant shouting in English with a strong French accent, “I am not John Lennon, I am John Lion!”

He continued to repeat this mantra multiple times as people either stood there smiling or made a quick exit in the opposite direction. Since the people in the bar (the smiling ones) offered him a drink and patted him on the back, I figured that this was not an uncommon occurrence.  A few minutes later my son shows up to tell me that it was this guy’s birthday and that before he came into the restaurant, he had run into his shop minus the thong!

When my son finished work, we went to a different restaurant for dinner which also had free WiFi for customers and since I still had my computer, my son wanted to show me a couple of things on Facebook.  We ended up on my Facebook page where I had very little written on my wall so I decided to post a message saying, “Visiting my son in the French Alps and watching naked Frenchmen running around in the streets”.

Now I only have about 15 friends on Facebook who can see my messages but within minutes I had 7 or 8 responses to my posting in addition to several requests to become my friend!

In this tiny little example, I had learned firsthand the power and effectiveness of social networking and viral messaging on the internet. No wonder so many businesses are shifting their sales, marketing and collaboration focus to this medium.

It is no longer sufficient just to have a nice looking web site to promote your business or interact with your customers and prospects. Without an internet social networking presence  through Blogs, Forums, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook and others, many businesses and institutions are simply missing out on marketing, sales, technical, cost savings, recruitment and collaboration (just to name a few) opportunities .

There is no other medium in the world today where information can be disseminated to so many people so quickly.

So get ready to see a lot more from InfoSol in the social networking arena in the coming weeks and months but that will not include video clips of naked Frenchmen running around in the Alps.

Related links: InfoBurst 2009 YouTube channel and 9 ways to use social networking for blog promotion

Then it dawned on me that I was supposed to wave the room key card at the door. This, of course, worked and a green light lit up and I was able to open the door. The room was pitch black inside and so I fumbled around for a light switch but to no avail.  However I did see a red glow on the wall on the right which was a square plate about the size of a regular light switch. I tried waving my room key at it but nothing happened. I felt around the plate and discovered it had a slot on top. I put my room key in the slot (I know, a stroke of genius especially after waving at the door with my hand!) and all the lights came on.

Anyway, I had to laugh to myself as I left the hotel to take the train to Lyon at my first encounter with a wave room key. When I arrived at the train station, I had to validate my ticket by placing it in a machine which recorded and stamped it – no human ticket collectors.

I left the train in Lyon and headed straight for my appointment with a partner where I was treated to a demonstration (over lunch of course) of the newest version of 360View Plus. This is the neat security management tool for BusinessObjects XI that allows you to view and manage user and object security access. The tool has this really cool security matrix grid that allows you to modify access rights with a single click on the relevant cell. It can also produce these fantastic reports in Excel that show different security access for users and objects that are really useful for auditing purposes. Anyway, the product has new drag and drop features making it even easier to manage security settings as well as the ability to automatically schedule the security audit reports.

Although in most BusinessObjects environments a small number of people tend to manage security, it is still important to make the task easy and intuitive. 360View Plus allows that and, in addition, makes it just as easy for Help Desk staff to have the ability to reset access so that key BusinessObjects administrators do not have to be involved with these tasks. Best of all 360View Plus provides the capability to manage multiple BO instances (CMS’s) from a single interface enabling remote security management of different sites as well as comparing security rights between environments.

As I returned to the station to take a train to Grenoble, I needed to buy a ticket. I just walked up to a machine with a touch screen and selected my preferences and paid by credit card on the spot. Since the train I was taking left in 10 minutes, the machine pre-validated my ticket prior to issuing it and once again, I boarded without any human intervention.

The need for automated simple user interfaces combined with solid security is a clear differentiator in today’s fast moving world. France certainly appears to be one of the innovators here.

Of course, it may take a little time for us non-French to catch on but you will not see me waving at a door in a hotel ever again!

I was hopeful (and hungry) for the main course – at least there would be pasta. The plate itself was larger than the one for the appetizer but this was a deception since there was a small indentation in the middle of the plate that actually housed the entirety of my meal. It was honestly the size of a golf ball consisting of two small scallops and something that was more like couscous than pasta!  It tasted great but it did not satisfy my hunger.

Needless to say there was plenty of time for conversation since the eating took just seconds! The discussion with a French customer in the insurance business centered on expectations of the results of a proof-of-concept. The customer was looking at a large project to migrate their main application to an open system environment. While they felt that the proof-of-concept fully demonstrated that the application itself could be migrated successfully, they wanted to see how the operational environment would be handled also.

When migrating software, we often overlook the environment on which it runs. Of course, if the environment does not change, it is understandable that it is not always considered. However, many businesses today change their hardware and operational environments more frequently than they change their software. With constant new features in hardware and underlying operating systems, as well as new ways to schedule and distribute information, there is plenty to take into consideration.

It turned out that this customer was most concerned about the printing of insurance cards since this has the biggest impact on their business. By migrating their application to new hardware and operating system, they would be changing their whole mechanism of scheduling, distributing and printing.

To me, this is not an unusual situation. In the world of Business Intelligence, I see it all the time since scheduling and distribution of reports is equally , if not more, important than ad-hoc query and analysis to many businesses. It is about delivering the right information in the right format to the right people at the right time.

It was quite appropriate that my next meeting with a partner was all about Business Intelligence report and dashboard scheduling, bursting and publishing. They have many clients throughout Europe with many needs to deliver pertinent information in Xcelsius dashboards and Microsoft Reporting Services Reports. I showed and explained how with InfoBurst 2009 you can now deliver bursted Xcelsius dashboards as standalone SWF files so each recipient sees the same dashboard but only with data relevant to them in it. In addition, InfoBurst 2009 supports the scheduling, bursting and publishing of Microsoft Reports .

After my last meeting, I was completely drained with my energy reserves running on life support. I suppose my lesson for the day was that it is important to meet all the needs of a customer’s application environment. Migrating the applications without taking care of the operational environment is like eating fine French cuisine without satisfying your body’s energy needs.

I ate a big meal tonight!